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People, TV Guide, Us Among Top Print Brands Online
Friday, August 14, 2009

Gone are the days when magazine brands predictably occupied a stagnant back bay of the Internet ecosystem. Some print brands are challenging endemic Web brands, portals and TV-fueled competitors in some categories. Using data from analytics firm Hitwise, MarketingCharts.com has published breakdowns of online traffic market share across a range of media verticals. Among print brands online, for instance, while NYTimes.com enjoys a comfortable lead among other newspapers and magazines with a 4.93% share of all traffic to the print category, People.com ranks third, with 2.37% of all traffic going to print brands online. In its monthly traffic numbers reported in min's Digital Media Boxscores, People.com claims an audience of over 30 million monthly uniques and over 600 million page views. TVGuide.com also fares well, coming in at fifth in the Hitwise chart. although the TVGuide.com site is no longer affiliated with the print brand. Rising star USMagazine.com is 10th, demonstrating along with People.com that celebrity news is a key traffic driver online. In fact, all three magazines in the Hitwise top 10 of print brands online are in the entertainment category of content.

Magazine brands also show up in a number of content categories. Disney’s FamilyFun.com is ranked eighth among “Family” Web sites that also include a number of major genealogy portals. In the “House and Garden” vertical, Meredith’s Better Homes & Gardens site (BHG.com) makes a very strong showing with 3.73% of that market compared to TV-powered rival HGTV.com (5.13% of the market). Martha Stewart’s online destination also ranks seventh in that category.

These Hitwise slices of comparative data suggest that at least a handful of major magazine brands have asserted their expertise online and beaten the endemic disadvantage that monthly and weekly print publishing schedules once imposed on these brands. Arguably, TV, radio and newspapers came onto the Web with infrastructures, news cycles and audience habits that were closer to the 24/7 rhythms of the Internet. Competition from digital start-ups and portals was even fiercer, as these companies grew from the bottom up with digital publishing in mind. Lest we forget, only five or six years ago most magazine branded sites were dripping occasional content online and hoping to sell print subscriptions there. People.com spent years peeking in and out of the AOL walled garden. Still lurching into an uncertain future, the industry can point to more than a few print brands that clearly have succeeded in making an impact on the digital media world.

Hitwise metrics measure market share of Web traffic from over 10 million users across content categories. Charts for a dozen categories in July are available at MarketingCharts.com.



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